The House Guest

This is Miss Sophie, my newest foster dog.  She is a 15 week old border collie puppy.

She has received the usual welcome from the resident Tool Bag.

He is just thrilled with her, which I think is obvious from the transparency of love stamped on his face.

Sophie is pretty “herdy”.

She likes to chase down the Littles and nip at them, or just mow them down.

“Oh shit!”

The Littles love this about as much as TWooie loves her.

After a couple of days worth of beatings from the Littles, she has now chosen to hang out with her own kind.

(But they completely ignore her)

It’s not as though she could hang out with Wootie; this is the only time we’ve seen him for the last, like, week.  He retrieved the frisbee exactly twice, lost his hearing, and then went off to hunt for small things.

The terriers are too busy fighting over who gets to play with her to actually play with her.

(just kidding)

So nobody in the household really likes her very much right now, except me.  Cuz she’s CUTE!

Not going to keep her though; she’s too soft for me, after years of battling the oh-so-strong personalities of Tweed, Dexter and The Fabulous Miss Piper.  She is very herdy but has the most amazing off switch inside, and rarely does anything other than nap and chew quietly on something she finds in the toy basket.  She isn’t what I would call “drivey” and I don’t think she’d make a really awesome sport dog, unless someone was willing to put a lot of work into confidence building and one-on-one bonding, as she is friendly, but independent.

This is not the agility dog I am looking for.

Apparently this is!

I’ve been working FaeFae at agility practice each week and she is coming along leaps and bounds!  She loves jumping and is already handling fairly reliably with semi-challenging sequences.  Once I brought the Manners Minder to class and employed it, she developed a serious love for contact obstacles and you can’t keep her off the dog walk now.  We have not yet started weaving, but I think she’ll catch on quick.  Her only nemesis is the Dreaded Teeter, which I can’t get her on for love nor money yet.  I even built her a little short teeter at home, and it tips literally like an inch and I can’t get her on that either.  It’s a challenge.  But aside from that, she is a ROCKET.  She’s going to be a furious little dynamo on the course!!

She should keep me suitably busy until it’s time to welcome a new pup, which is in my five year plan (because we all know my plans for dog additions go according to schedule).  Because while I hope all of my dogs live to ripe old ages and enjoy every minute of it, eventually some of them are going to go to the big doghouse in the sky and once my numbers are down, I’ll be ready to add a puppy.

In the meantime, I will just foster to keep the puppy lust at bay.

(But if you’re in the market for a puppy NOW, feel free to contact me about this one!)

Plus I still have this puppy:

I brought him to a Doggie Stuff swap today to get him socializing, and he did really well.  Since it was all experienced dog people, everyone had cookies and therefore everyone was good for greeting rather than running away from.  This is good!  But I got really tired of hearing the sentence “He is so much cuter in person than in his pictures!” because what *I* hear when people say that is “Your photos of him are so shitty.”  Personally, I think he is adorable both in person AND in his photos.

It’s not my fault he haz Serious Face in many of his photos.

(those ears tho)

So to sum up; I have a puppy but it’s not my puppy.  I’m not getting a puppy until I get a puppy.  I take nice photos of puppies, even cuter-in-person puppies.  Puppies are cute, but they’re no Dexter.

(that photo is straight outta the camera, no post processing at all except for cropping).

He takes a damn fine photo.  But WTF is with that TONGUE?!?!  He could shovel snow with that thing!

Fortunately it was a beautiful sunny day here, no snow shovels required :)